(Transcribed from his comments – edited for clarity).
I also want to thank the applicant team and our dedicated city staff for their continued work on this. I think it’s a good thing that we’re taking the necessary time to really dig into this alternative and the EIR writ large to… and even if that means that the election won’t be when we, maybe initially I had hoped, but I think it makes sense that we be deliberate about this.
I’m pleased with that decision just on its own. And thanks to everybody involved in moving us in that deliberative direction.
I recognize that this is the last city council meeting where I will be able to speak about this project as a city council member. And so I probably will leave some parting thoughts.
First and foremost, I am kind of a broken record on this, but a lot of the questions that we’re asking today, a lot of the items that were brought up by folks in public comment, these are things that the EIR is investigating, so we will know more when we are able to digest the EIR. That’s the nature of the process.
I think to maybe Donna’s (Neville) question about when in the process do we find out about other sorts of non-EIR things, for example, over-crossings or under-crossings. Those come in the course of our negotiation with the development team and our being the body that I’ll not be on moving this forward or not or determining whether to move this forward and what form to the voters.
Feasibility is an input into that process, but it is not the end of the conversation. If there’s something that the city determines needs to be part of the project, then a new negotiation lever is pulled.
I do want to say a couple of things that I think are, well, folks will deny it. I think they’re undeniably true.
Number one, over the course of the next few years, we need one or potentially several projects of this size, housing projects of this size in Davis, not something that you’re going to find with an ADU here and a duplex there, and a few apartments over a shopping center.
We have a housing crisis that we are addressing, and we need a project of this size. I believe that’s undeniable.
Secondly, I believe this is also undeniable. This is the absolute best place in town for that project to be full stop.
A child could go to every level from kindergarten and graduate high school without traveling a full mile.
The idea that it being near existing travel destinations is somehow a negative, and that because it’s near an intersection that a lot of people already use on a daily basis because they have to, because it’s a major crossroads of our community. The idea that that’s a negative is absurd.
The alternative would be building it out in the middle of nowhere, right?
If you want to find a not-impacted intersection, I think Road 29 and Road 95 is a not impacted intersection. Let’s just build stuff out in the middle of nowhere and have sprawl.
If you want fewer impacted intersections, you have folks biking to school and biking to work and biking to the grocery store, biking to the dentist. You don’t have ’em driving in from Woodland or West Sacramento.
If you were serious about reducing traffic in the middle of town, you wouldn’t require people to live out of town. It’s ridiculous.
They’re taking on this floodplain issue and improving the engineering to prevent floods, not just on their project, but throughout our community.
They’re building a fire station, so people who live, for example, where I live, will finally be within the five minute response time. My entire life I’ve lived north of Covell Boulevard outside of these best practice response times, I want someone to come to my house, if I’m calling 9 1 1, in under five minutes. It’s been a part of our community’s plan for 40 years now that we ought to have a fire station on Covell, and this is our best opportunity to do it.
There’s a lot of details still to be worked out about this project, but the idea that it’s going to be an empty field for another 20 years would be a detriment to the future of our community.
I’m going to leave it at that. Once again, I’m very thankful to the work that’s been done thus far, and there’s a lot of work to be done going forward, but our community deserves something like this and they deserve it here.
I’m going to miss Will being on the CC.